Tag: biotechnology
IFIC video - “What’s for Lunch?
By cgfi | February 28, 2008
This short YouTube friendly video addresses consumer concerns about food choice from the International Food Information Council Foundation(IFIC). This humorous and entertaining look at how food is grown and produced is aimed at those who are uncertain about the differences between organic, biotechnology and conventional food production methods. Narrated by an improv comic, and featuring interviews with nutrition and food safety experts and the “person on the street,” the clip aims to assure consumers that the only choice that matters is the healthful, nutritious one.
Posted in Multimedia |No Comments »
“What’s for Lunch?” Video from IFIC Addresses Consumer Concerns About School Lunch Choices
By admin | February 28, 2008
International Food Information Council Foundation posts humorous school lunch video in popular You Tube space.
Washington, DC (PRWEB) February 19, 2008 — Introducing “What’s for Lunch?,” a short YouTube friendly video that addresses consumer concerns about food choice from the International Food Information Council Foundation(IFIC). This humorous and entertaining look at how food is grown and produced is aimed at those who are uncertain about the differences between organic, biotechnology and conventional food production methods. Narrated by an improv comic, and featuring interviews with nutrition and food safety experts and the “person on the street,” the clip (aims to assure consumers that the only choice that matters is the healthful, nutritious one.
The IFIC Foundation is the educational arm of IFIC. IFIC’s mission is to communicate science-based information on food safety and nutrition to health and nutrition professionals, educators, journalists, government officials and others providing information to consumers. IFIC is supported primarily by the broad-based food, beverage and agricultural industries.
Posted in News |No Comments »
Meeting The Needs Of A Hungrey World—What Role Does Biotechnology Play?
By cgfi | April 29, 2005
The short and the sweet of it is that the world is in the midst of the largest increase in global food demand in human history. At least a doubling of food demand will unfold in the next 30-40 years, primarily as a result of economic growth in Asia, but also in Eastern Europe and parts of South America and Mexico. That economic growth is driving a greater demand for protein and improved diets throughout the developing world. In Asia, the incredible demand growth is outpacing their agricultural capacity in terms of both land and other resources.
In the next 30-40 years, Asia will have half of the world’s food and fiber consumers, but less than one third of the world’s arable land and less than one fourth of the world’s pasture. In short, Asia will be unable to feed and clothe itself entirely on its own.
WORLD FOOD CHALLENGES-POPULATION
The two factors affecting world food needs and farm product demand are population growth and individual income growth.
The world passed the six billion mark in 1999. The world’s overall population growth rate is currently about 1.5 percent per year—adding an additional 80-85 million consumers each year to the global population. That’s another Mexico added to the world’s consumer base each year, or an additional New York City every month. While an additional 85 million people per year may seem daunting, we are far from heading toward a population disaster.
In fact, we’re now for the first time at the point that adding the next billion people will take longer than the previous billion, indicating that the global population train has its brakes on hard. But it has taken a while for the train to scrub off momentum.
Since the 1960s when the alarm over “over-population” was first raised, we have learned that while poor farmers mostly have large families, affluent urban people have small families. The world is moving rapidly toward urban affluence, and its birth rates are plummeting. Europe is now down to a fertility rate of about 1.6-1.7 children per couple, with Germany, Italy, and Spain as low as 1.2 children per couple. Italy has been offering a $1,200 subsidy for 2nd Italian children to ensure the country is not totally abandoned to Albanian and North African immigrants.
In the former Third World, birth rates have fallen 80 percent of the way to stability, from about 6.2 births per couple in 1960 to about 3 births today with birth rates continuing to decline rapidly. Stability is 2.1. The UN Population Division has now lowered its peak projection for the global human population—again—to between 8 and 9 billion people. That still means a substantial increase of about 50% over the world’s current population over the next 45 years or so.
WORLD FOOD NEEDS-AFFLUENCE
This leaves income gains in countries not yet well fed as the farmers’ best friend, and such gains are continuing. The good news for the pork industry is that this is occurring in cultures where pork is the preferred food. The flip side is that the protein competition will get more intense as the wealthier consumers diversify their diets.
The GATT, now the World Trade Organization (WTO), has clearly shown itself to be the most successful international institution in human experience. It replaced tariff wars with economic growth. World non-farm trade has increased nearly 20-fold since 1950, and is still rising.
As a result of the explosion in world trade, nearly 3 billion people in Asia are now living in market-oriented economies that have been increasing their national economic output by nearly 10 percent per year, compounded, since 1980. This economic growth is headlined by Japan, but also includes Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Pakistan, Mauritius, and southern China. India and Indonesia have come a long way as well.
Nearly half of the world’s population lives in Asia. And as Asia continues to grow, both in population and economically, we can look to Japan as a model of what to expect from the region as a whole.
SURGING DEMAND FOR BETTER DIETS
The first thing that less affluent people do when they get more income is to bid for better diets. First, they want more rice and wheat. Then, they buy more cooking oil. Then, they buy more eggs, milk and, finally, more meat, fruits, and vegetables.
Meat demand in Asia has been skyrocketing alongside the rise in personal incomes:
Japan was the first of the Asian tigers, and it has become the first of the Asian meat consumers as well. A country that once consumed less than 15 grams per day of animal protein and felt urgent concern about having fish on the plate, is now nearing 60 grams per day of meat and dairy products. If Japan did not still have such high tariffs on beef imports, the average Japanese might already eat more than 70 grams of animal protein. The Japanese meat consumption pattern is being emulated in Taiwan.
China, of course, is the huge Asian food challenge, with 1.25 billion people raising their incomes at a speed never before seen in a large country. China has been raising its meat consumption at 10 percent annually for the past decade, more than doubling its national meat consumption in the 1990s. Most of the expansion to date has been pork, but the demand for both beef and poultry have more than doubled and are still growing. Chinese pork consumption increased nearly 70 percent in the 1990s and is currently expanding by more than one million tons per year.
Moslem countries, also, are joining in the meat demand, even though they forego pork due to their majority Muslem populations.
Indonesia, which is both Moslem and Asian, has increased its poultry consumption dramatically. The broiler flock rose 25 percent in 1995 alone, to 600 million birds. The demand for corn in poultry feeds has been rising by 4 million tons per year as the feed industry expanded by 13 percent annually.
NEW CLOTHES, BEER AND DOGS
But just because you’re involved in pork, doesn’t mean you should ignore the rest of the agricultural economy, because it will have an enormous impact on the pork industry as well.
The growing global affluence means that once we have fed the 8.5 billion people the way they prefer, we’ll have to satisfy their other growing farm product appetites because these consumers will drink and dress better, too. China’s beer consumption has more than tripled in the last decade. Imagine how much additional grain would be required if every one of the 700 million Chinese men drank just one extra beer per month. That’s 8 billion bottles of beer in a year!
Huge populations of people are moving from societies where everyone owned only two cotton outfits apiece, to a dozen and more—just like any other modern society.
There will even be a pet food challenge. The U.S. has 113 million pet cats and dogs for 270 million people. All over the world, ownership of companion animals and pet food sales rise with incomes. Already, China’s small-family policy is stimulating increased pet ownership. It is reasonable to project that China in 2050 will have more than 500 million cats and dogs, translating into significantly increased demand for pet food, including more meat, fishmeal and protein meal.
Combining the expected 50% increase in global population with the fact that most of these additional people will live in countries that are radically increasing individual consumption of high-protein foods—foods that take 3-5 times more farm resources per calorie than cereal calories—it is easy to see how overall farm resource demand will at least double, and will more likely triple over the next 45 years.
AG BIOTECHNOLOGY TODAY AND TOMORROW
Biotechnology is already playing a huge and growing role in transforming agriculture in the 21st century. It is making farming more environmentally friendly and more sustainable, despite the fact that we’re still in the comparative “biplane” stage of agricultural genetic engineering. We’re years away from the equivalent “jet age,” when the promise of agricultural biotechnology will produce self-fertilizing (nitrogen-fixing) crops that produce an appropriate array of insect protectants and are able to better withstand drought, salinity, and other adverse growing conditions. They may one day even produce their own natural herbicides to fight off weeds.
This will mean quantum reductions in fossil fuel use, pesticide and herbicide use, and far greater environmental sensitivity. Soils in our fields will improve, with less compaction from tractor traffic, higher organic matter levels, and greater water holding capacity. Topsoil loss will drop even further even as crop yields increase. Off farm impacts from sediment and nutrient runoff will decline further still.
This promise is already being realized.
First and foremost, herbicide tolerant crops—the largest single category of biotech crops currently planted, with 73% of the global biotech total—have made soil-conserving low- and no-tillage cropping possible on more farmland acres and made it more attractive to farmers to use these methods. And because of better and more timely weed control, herbicide-tolerant biotech crops have increased yields modestly while drastically reducing costs.
Low- and no-till farming is when weeds are killed with herbicides rather than killing them mechanically by plowing, disking, scraping, etc. Since the introduction of biotech herbicide tolerant crops, no-till crop acreage has increased nearly 40 percent in the United States. Two thirds of U.S. soybean growers who reduced their tillage since 1996 cited herbicide tolerant crops as a key factor. In addition, biotechnology tools to streamline conventional breeding have resulted in several non-genetically engineered herbicide tolerant crops that are already on the market. These approaches are becoming important to overcoming consumer resistance to these novel crop technologies.
In the United States, no till and conservation tillage farming annually save an estimated $3.5 billion in water treatment, waterway maintenance, navigation, flooding, and recreation costs. Fuel use is also drastically cut, as pulling tillage implements through the soil burns lots of tractor fuel. The savings total over 300 million gallons of diesel fuel each year in the U.S.
All of this results in better crop soil quality, with increased soil carbon, increased water infiltration and water holding capacity, greater soil tilth, 3 to 6 times larger earth worm populations, and better in-field wildlife benefits. Quail are estimated to find their food in one-fifth of the time in a no-till field compared to a plowed field—as the plant residues and soil structure have more beetles, insects and other food for wildlife.
Importantly, biotech has given us crops tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate, or Roundup, one of the most environmentally safe farm chemicals because it has low toxicity and breaks down rapidly into harmless byproducts.
These crops have become well established in several key animal feed export countries, including the U.S., and Argentina and Brazil—who together are the number one producer and exporter of soybeans, mostly for livestock production.
Nor are the benefits of herbicide tolerant crops limited to farmers in the developed countries. One of Subsaharan Africa’s worst pests is witchweed, a parasitic weed that can devastate corn and sorghum yields, the key food grains in the region. A new strategy is preparing for field trials, which will plant herbicide-tolerant corn seeds, soaked in a systemic herbicide which can kill the witchweed as it attempts to invade the plants’ roots. That could protect food yields on millions of small African farms.
Insect protected crops are the second largest biotech crop in acreage terms, with18% of the global biotech total. Currently, these incorporate a protein toxic to plant-eating caterpillars from the natural soil bacteria Bacillus thurengiensis, or Bt. This drastically reduces the amount of insecticides used in growing crops, especially corn and cotton. In the U.S., biotech Bt crops reduced insecticide use in 2003 by nearly 7 million pounds, reducing potential pollution and ecological impacts.
Organic farmers have been spraying aqueous solutions of Bt bacteria on crops for decades as a pesticide and Bt is extremely safe. After seven years of widespread planting on millions of acres, there is still no evidence of pest resistance to biotech Bt. , In fact, the only documented case of pest resistance to Bt was from over-reliance on sprayed Bt.
The results of biotech insect protected crops are increased productivity, less pest damage, higher quality, and increased profitability. All of these benefits are scale neutral, and farmers from the subsistence level to the largest have rapidly adopted biotech crops. For livestock production, one key benefit of insect-protected crops besides lower cost is a marked reduction in mycotoxins, which can adversely affect animal performance and health.
One third of biotech crops are now grown in developing countries. Farmers in South Africa and the Philippines are growing Bt corn for food and feed. Indian and Chinese smallholder farmers are growing large amounts of Bt cotton, increasing yields and incomes and reducing pesticide deaths. China is growing Bt cotton on 7 million of its 12 million acres of cotton, or 58%. This affects potential cotton meal and oil export sales to some degree, but the benefits are clear and overwhelming.
Indian farmers are officially growing only 250,000 acres of Bt cotton crops, or about 1% of the total Indian cotton area of 22 million acres. But there are literally thousands of acres of illegal Bt cotton—the result of fraud by an Indian seed company and the impatience of Indian farmers. But it tells you that when farmers in developing countries have the opportunity to see for themselves the benefits of biotech, they rapidly adopt it. The productivity, pollution, and sustainability benefits are significant.
In the near future there will hopefully be biotech revolutions in even more crops. How about a super-eco-potato, a biotech potato that is resistant to the Colorado Potato Beetle, a devastating virus spread by aphids, and the ruinous potato blight. The insect and viral protection are already realities and were even grown in the U.S. for a couple of years until the fast food companies found out and refused to purchase them. The blight-resistance could be in farmers fields within 5 years. Combining the blight-proof trait with the already proven and approved insect and virus resistance could cut global fungicide and insecticide use by tens of millions of pounds per year, with less spraying, fuel use, soil compaction.
Scientists have also already produced salt and aluminum tolerant crops through genetic engineering. Dr. Eduardo Blumwald at UC Davis has developed salt tolerant tomatoes and canola by inserting more copies of natural tomato salt pump genes into the genome. This has resulted in tomatoes that can grow in nearly 40% seawater.
Not only that, but this may be a way to deal with the salinization of the world’s irrigated croplands—the problem that killed the hanging gardens of Babylon. Irrigated fields are our most productive croplands and salts are in all water used for irrigation. The canola plants store up to 18 grams of salt in their leaves during the growing season. Their oilseeds have no more salts than conventional canola (same for the tomatoes). After the canola is harvested, the farmer can harvest the leaves, and dispose of the salts. Sustainability wise, this is nearly as big an advance as synthetic fertilizers.
NON-TRANSGENIC BIOTECH IMPROVEMENTS
We can now fully explore and exploit the yield-enhancing genes from wild crop relatives as well, which will help keep feed costs down as global farmland competition heats up in the coming decades. Two researchers from Cornell University scanned the genomes of wild rice and tomatoes and identified superior gene variants that human breeding had inadvertently eliminated.
Using biotechnology, they swapped the inferior genes for the superior ones—natural genes from the crops’ own wild relatives—and increased yields considerably. In rice, each of the gene variants increased the yields of the best Chinese rice hybrids by nearly 20 percent. In tomatoes, they increased solids yield by an incredible 50 percent.
BIOTECH ANIMAL NUTRITION ADVANCES
We’re now at the point where we’re able to significantly alter nutritional characteristics of major food and feed staples, and this will soon have a major impact on livestock production around the world.
While most have heard about Golden Rice that contains beta-carotene to prevent blindness and disease in developing countries where malnutrition is currently quite high, the potential to tailor feed crops for specific animal production characteristics is still largely unexploited. However, this will change dramatically over the next decade.
Phytate/Phytase: Biotechnology has already given us the ability to identify crop mutants that have lower phytate levels and increased available phosphorus. However, these varieties also have had lower yields, discouraging their use. That is why feed makers have added bacterially-derived phytase to animal feed rations. Yet here too there are increased expenses and problems in maintaining enzyme activity through the manufacturing and transport process, which has also limited their use.
Biotechnology will soon allow us to produce transgenic crops with heat-resistant, stable forms of phytase in the grain itself, drastically reducing costs while increasing performance and reliability. Initial studies have found no adverse effects from these phytase-enhanced transgenic crop feeds on animal health. Moreover, crop performance should be able to be maintained because the phytase production can be targeted to the grain itself and therefore should not hinder crop performance.
Amino Acid/Protein Balance: Biotechnology is also allowing us to more easily and cheaply tailor the amino acid balance of the feeds for optimal animal nutrition and efficient protein synthesis in livestock. Cereal proteins are deficient in lysine and tryptophan. Breeding with opaque-2 mutants has produced “quality protein maize” with improvements in the lysine and tryptophan contents of the seed proteins. Legume proteins are often deficient in methionine, cysteine and lysine. Wild soybean germplasm with improved contents of methionine and cysteine may be used to introgress this trait into the cultivated soybeans, just as the researchers have done to increase rice and tomato yields. Biotechnology may also be useful through expression of foreign proteins that are rich in the amino acids that are limiting in the crop plant.
Energy/Oil Traits: High oil corn developed via breeding is on the market. These varieties have seeds with larger embryos, producing increased content of oil, essential amino acids and vitamins in the seed. Feeds containing this energy-dense corn improve animal performance. These are sold as single cross hybrids or as blends. Blends are composed of a pollinator variety having a very high oil content together with a conventional corn variety. The hybrid seeds produced in the field have oil content midway between that of the parents. High oil grain developed via biotechnology may reach the marketplace within 5 years.
Vaccination via feed. Edible vaccines delivered via feeds may also help to maintain the health of livestock in the future. Animals have been immunized against diseases through feeding of transgenic plants expressing antigens (i.e. subunit vaccines) from various microbes. These edible vaccines have been successful against diseases caused by transmissible gastroenteritis coronavirus, foot-and-mouth disease virus, rabies virus, swine diarrhea, avian influenza, bovine viral diarrhea virus, swine fever virus and rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus. Some of these are now being entered into veterinary trials, but it will be some time before any edible vaccine products are licensed for marketing. Nevertheless, this biotechnology strategy has great potential for providing benefits that could not be achieved through plant breeding approaches.
Biotech plants have also been used to produce chimeric plant virus particles expressing antigens from various animal pathogens. These chimeric plant virus particles have been purified from host plant tissue and used as vaccine injections. Antigen structures displayed on the surface of these virus particles are very effective in stimulation of immune responses in animals. These plant-derived vaccines have been successful for protection of animals against infectious diseases such as canine parvovirus, mink enteritis virus, feline panleucopenia virus and Staphylococcus aureus.
BARRIERS TO THE BIOTECH BONANZA
In short, the promise of agricultural genetic engineering is enormous. It will allow us to grow more food from less land and far fewer inputs. Our production will be safer, more efficient, and far more cost effective.
However, there are still significant barriers to biotechnology acceptance. The key barrier is consumer unease. Biotechnology is new and in many consumers eyes, it is untested, despite the enormous experience gained over the past decade of biotech crop production and use.
This unease and unfamiliarity—amplified by the generally poor scientific literacy of the vast majority of consumers—has meant that acceptance has been slow and uneven. While U.S. consumers have more or less accepted biotechnology in agriculture fairly readily, this is certainly not true of many countries, notably Europe and the more affluent sectors of Asia.
Part of this can be laid at the hands of activist groups and others who have a philosophical opposition to the use of biotechnology in food and fiber production. Groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and other anti-biotech activists are now global actors and have made opposition to ag biotechnology a centerpiece of their efforts.
However, I believe that this opposition will soon wane. In fact, I think that the biotech “war”, so to speak, has already been won and only the final battles remain to be fought.
Part of this can be attributed to the enormous success and “GE diplomacy” of biotech cotton. It’s not a food crop, and no amount of fearmongering has served to frighten farmers or consumers about the cotton it produces. Instead, farmers and governments have been enormously impressed by the ability of biotech cotton to resist the voracious pests that had always made cotton the most intensively pesticide-sprayed crop in agriculture.
China, India, and South Africa now feel heavily dependent on biotech cotton to preserve not only their cotton farmers’ livelihoods but also the millions of industrial jobs that depend on their cotton production.
Famine has been another winning issue for biotech. The activist efforts to bar American food aid corn from the famine stricken regions of southern Africa seem to have backfired. When the president of Zambia said he would not distribute U.S. food aid corn to starving people who’d already been reduced to boiling poisonous roots, the world shuddered. The reality that no harm has been linked to biotech crops was extended to many more people. The inhumanity of the eco-activists was exposed in a new way.
This year, Brazil has decided to permit the planting of biotech soybeans. According to that country’s major soybean growers, this is likely to stimulate another expansion of soy production there, because it will sharply reduce growers’ costs.
In the future, if Europe wants to continue importing non-biotech soybeans, it may actually have to pay a premium to get them. Will Europe do this? If so, that will put EU hog producers at a further disadvantage in world competition.
Will the WTO uphold the EU constraints of biotech development and trade? That will be highly interesting as well.
In almost any case, it seems likely that the rest of the world will proceed with genetically modified crops, and eventually even biotech animal developments.
HIGH YIELD CONSERVATION: A WINNING STRATEGY
Someone must tell the urban public about the environmental benefits of high-yield modern farming and why we should be carefully but deliberately embracing these technologies because of the growing maw of affluent consumers who will NOT be satisfied with a vegetarian future. I submit that it will have to be agriculture.
Agriculture and agricultural researchers must talk about saving wildlands and wild species with better seeds. We must talk about conquering soil erosion with high yields (so there’s less farmland to erode) and conservation tillage (which radically reduces erosion per acre of farmland). We must talk about preventing forest losses to slash-and-burn farming (the cause of destruction for two-thirds of the tropical forest we’ve lost). We must point out that where high-yield farming is practiced, the amount of forest is expanding. We must point out that the losses in wildlife habitat overwhelmingly occur where the farmers get low yields.
Agriculture already uses about 37 percent of the earth’s land surface, and any land not already in a city or a farm is wildlife habitat. And if the world has 30 million wildlife species, (a reasonable biologist’s “guesstimate”) then 25-27 million of them are probably in the tropical rain forests, with most of the remainder in such critical habitats as wetlands, coral reefs and mountain microclimates. These are places we have not farmed, and should not farm.
Through the higher yields per acre afforded by the use of pesticides, fertilizers, confinement meat and dairy production and modern food processing, modern high-yield farming has already saved millions of square miles of wildlife habitat from conversion to agricultural use.
Our peer-reviewed estimate is that the modern food system is currently saving something on the order of 15-20 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed for low-yield food production. That makes it the greatest conservation triumph in modern history.
Thus the key to conserving the natural world in the 21st century will be what the Hudson Institute calls “high-yield conservation.” Meeting both the food and forestry challenges of the 21st century, while leaving room for nature, will depend on our ability to continue increasing the food and fiber yields per acre of land and per unit of input from plants, animals and trees on our best land, and transporting the products to where the people are demanding it.
Two years ago, we were joined by nearly 1,000 scientists and conservationists in signing the High Yield Conservation Declaration. The keynote signers were Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oscar Arias (former President of Costa Rica), Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, and GAIA hypothesis creator James Lovelock. They recognize the challenge we face in the 21st century of feeding and clothing humanity without taking any more land from nature. (www.highyieldconservation.org)
Please visit this site and sign your names to this global petition. And while you take home the news of the coming advances in pork and feed production, please also take with you the message of high yield conservation. This concept is gaining increased acceptance and will be a key aspect of future acceptance of even more radical changes in livestock and feed crop production that will maintain pork’s share of the global food market.
Pork is an amazingly widely accepted food. But if consumers become falsely convinced that it contributes to environmental degradation or burden, then pork will see its share of the consumer protein diet decline needlessly.
I thank you for your time and your attention.
Posted in Materials and Publications, Speeches |No Comments »
Has America Already Lost High-Yield Agriculture?
By cgfi | October 6, 2003
America has had a proud two centuries of world leadership in high-yield agricultural research and technology. It stretches back to George Washington’s farming experiments and Abraham Lincoln signing the Morrill Act to create the land-grant colleges and agricultural experiment stations. It includes the hybrid seeds, mechanization, and pesticides that produce ample American ample food-while retaining more forest than we had in 1900 with one-fourth today’s population.
America’s agricultural research leadership fostered the high-yield Green Revolution in the Third World. That Green Revolution saved billions of people from starving in Asia and Latin America, and preserved huge amounts of wildlands from being cleared for low-yield crops. My peer-reviewed estimate is that with 1950s crop yields, the world would have needed another 12 million square miles of cropland to produce the 1992 food supply. (If we factor in today’s larger demand and the land saved by high-efficiency confinement livestock, modern farming may well be saving wildlands equal to the world’s total forest area-about 16 million square miles.)
The American tradition of high-yield agricultural research lay behind this country’s recent world-leading investments in agricultural biotechnology, both public and private. Such biotech investments were once the best hope that the world could triple crop yields again in the next 40 years, to feed a peak population of 8 to 9 billion affluent people and their pets without clearing the world’s remaining wildlands. (We’re already farming half the land on the planet not covered by deserts and glaciers.)
America’s agricultural leadership should be one of this country’s proudest achievements.
The stark reality, however, is that this proud tradition may be ending now, just as the world is facing its biggest agricultural challenge of all time.
America’s high-yield agriculture no longer has the support and confidence of the urbanites that make up 95 percent of this country’s voters. In this affluent, risk-averse, farming-ignorant era, American farmers need an operating permit from the city folks-and they don’t have it.
Well-fed urban Americans are convinced that modern, high-yield agriculture is too risky to their health and the environment. They want farmers regulated back into the safety of low-yield organic production. After all, America has plenty of food and farmland. We don’t need to spray pesticides that “might someday be linked to cancer.” We don’t need even the perception of wastes from factory farms spewed into our rivers.
U.S. agriculture cannot get public approval for biotechnology, and every other element of high-yield agriculture is under regulatory threat as well. A vocal minority overwhelms the uncaring majority, and drives regulators toward more and more constraints on pesticides, confinement feeding, Diesel fuel, dust, water, and even plant food.
In 1958, I wrote a paper for a political science class at Wisconsin on the agricultural research and extension system. The professor criticized me for not listing the system’s opponents. I said, “Professor, there aren’t any.” In 1958, that was almost literally true. But that was long ago.
Recently, a consortium of foundations, The Collaborative for Health and the Environmnent, with total assets of $3.5 billion has reportedly begun talking of a ten-year campaign to convince medical students that pesticides must be banned. Their hope is that these impressionable students will ultimately develop into a condemning majority within the medical profession.
In the last decade, I’ve come to understand much more clearly how China in the 12th century and Japan in the 17th century could have closed their borders and frozen their technology levels. In both countries, the ruling class began to feel trade and technology getting beyond their control. Rather than let commoners run amuck with dangerous ideas about gunpowder and ships’ compasses,the elites shut everything down.
We’re seeing much the same sort of syndrome in Europe today, with the European elites putting up the “precautionary principle” as their response to “overpopulation,” immigration, urban sprawl, fast-food restaurants, and other discomforting trends. American elites are very much tempted to follow in their path.
Agricultural research and technology cannot survive the precautionary principle. No technology can prove the negative of doing no harm, ever, to any person or thing in the environment. Not electricity, not antibiotics, not fertilizer.
North Carolina’s Theft of Farmers’ Rights
Today, the state of North Carolina maintains a moratorium on new confinement hog houses that has been in place since 1997. The public reason is that factory hog farms threatened the water quality in local streams and rivers. However, the state has never released any water quality data supporting the claims of river pollution from well-run (and state-regulated) confinement hog farms.
Outdoor hog farms, as we all know, let their wastes wash into the nearest stream with every storm event. But confinement hog farms are managed essentially on a zero-discharge basis. There should be no stream pollution.
For more than a decade, however, activists have charged huge pollution levels from confinement hogs.A North Carolina State scientist, Dr. Joanne Burkholder, claimed that the hog manure fostered “the cells from hell,” fish-toxic dinoflagellates called Pfiesteria. Bobby Kennedy Jr. called confinement hogs a bigger threat than Osama Bin Laden.
Finally, this year, the Cape Fear River Assembly asked if our Center could do an objective analysis of the state’s water quality data. We agreed; but we had to threaten legal action before the state would release the water data. The pattern from the data was very clear. The quality of the rivers is good and not declining. (The primary “hog river,” the Black, is rated an outstanding resource water.) The nutrient levels in the North Carolina “hog rivers” are just about what they were 15 years ago before the hog expansion. The nutrient spikes in the rivers are not downstream from the hog farms, but immediately downstream from the sewage treatment plants.
For ten years or more, the government of North Carolina has been living a lie to the farmers in its poorest counties. These farmers weren’t able to grow affluence from cotton, tobacco, or peanuts. Until the hog expansion, they had to move to the cities to make money. Hogs have moved them up to the median income for all North Carolina counties.
But the city folks don’t like hogs in their state, even when they’re out of sight and beyond olfactory range. The city newspapers wrote alarmingly about the hog farms. In response to perceived voter opinion, the politicians decided to stop hog expansion. And for ten years, no one in the North Carolina governmental structure has been willing to tell the truth-that the confinement hog farms are fine for the environment, good for the state’s economy, and an asset to a bacon-loving nation. (Other academic researchers have been unable to replicate Dr. Burkholder’s toxic Pfiesteria, with or without hog manure.)
Are Farmers Killing the Salmon in the Pacific Northwest?
Out on the West Coast, for decades farmers have been accused of causing the decline of the region’s fabulous salmon runs. The myth is that farmers demanded dams to irrigate their crops; the crops stole the salmon’s river water while the dams and sediment from the crops stifled the salmon’s reproduction.
Today, seventeen eco-groups are suing to breach four federal dams on the Snake River, which they say are direct salmon-killers. This spring, a federal judge rejected a federal salmon rescue plan because it did not include breaching the dams.
Amid the debate, no one seems to notice that the salmon are recovering on their own. I predicted this three years ago. The salmon run last year was the biggest in a decade. The reason? There’s a 25-year cycle in Pacific salmon. For 25 years, Oregon and Washington have lots of salmon-while the salmon canneries in the Gulf of Alaska don’t. Then the cycle reverses, as it did in 1977. For the last 25 years, the Alaskan fishermen have had lots of salmon, but now Oregon and Washington’s turn.
Fishermen have known about this remarkable 25-year cycle for a century. Now, even the academics are beginning to write learned papers about “co-variance” between the Alaskan and Oregon fisheries, and the salmon’s linkage to the huge Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
Did the Sierra Club know about the 25-year cycle before the suits were filed and not tell us? Or just not know?
The Mild, Unstoppable Global Warming That Will Be
Virtually all of the warming that’s occurred in the past 120 years occurred before 1940, before much greenhouse gas was emitted by human industries and autos. Thereafter, the climate stubbornly refused to warm for 40 years, despite huge greenhouse emissions.
The world’s known temperature history includes a Medieval Warming of perhaps 3 degrees Fahrenheit (950 to1300 AD), followed by the much-colder Little Ice Age, from 1300 to 1850 AD. History also tells us about a Roman Warming, from 200 BC to 400 AD, followed by an Ice Age from 400 to 950 AD. The world has been moderately warming and cooling for as far back in history as we have records.
Last year, an elegant and careful analysis of iceberg debris from the floor of the North Atlantic showed that the world has had nine moderate global warmings and nine global coolings in the last 12,000 years-coinciding exactly with a known cycle in the magnetic activity of the sun. By this analysis, we are about 150 years into a mild, natural, global warming that will last another 500 years. The cycle will return us to what history calls the Medieval Climate Optimum-the finest weather humanity can remember.
The Great Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone Syndrome
During the Clinton Administration, a White House task force was all set to impose a 30 percent cut in farmers’ fertilizer use on half a billion square miles of the American heartland between the Appalachians and the Rockies- the most productive agricultural region in the world. They were willing to order this massive land-use change on the basis of 15 years of data from a single source: one annual small-boat voyage by a Louisiana scientist, Dr. Nancy Rabelais, to measure the low-oxygen zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Never mind that virtually all the nutrients for the Gulf of Mexico’s rich marine come down the Mississippi, and no one knows how much nitrogen the Gulf fish need. Or, that there are hypoxic zones at the mouths of some 40 major world rivers. (The laws of biology and physics dictate it.)
Never mind that huge loads of nutrients came down the Mississippi before Columbus, from 60 million bison, 100 million antelope, billions of birds, and trillions of grasshoppers all munching and defecating on the grasses of the Great Plains.
Never mind that even Rabelais’ own data show the size of the hypoxic zone in the Gulf varying primarily with the river’s flow. It nearly disappeared in the 1988 drought year, and surged in size for three years after 1993’s “flood of the century.”
Never mind that nitrogen fertilizer use on Midwest farms plateaued two decades ago while corn yields have since risen 20 percent. That means more of the fertilizer is being harvested as corn, leaving less to leach into the river. More of the region’s poultry and livestock are being raised indoors, and their wastes applied as organic fertilizer in zero-discharge management. Where would the N come from to drive an expanding “dead zone” at the mouth of the Mississippi?
Even the Clinton White House Task Force could find no ecological or economic damage to the Gulf-but they were willing to force a huge constraint on modern farming because we’ve let modern farming be perceived as a problem in itself.
The Organic Illusion
Virtually every urban resident in the First World today has widespread praise for organic food and organic farming. Rachel Carson’s misinforming book, Silent Spring, published in 1962, played on our fears of lurking, man-made carcinogens. But in the intervening years, non-smokers’ cancer rates have trended down where pesticides have been used.
In fact, the British Advertising Standards Authority has forbidden the organic industry to make any claims about better health or better nutrition for organic foods. In the movement’s 60 years, it has never been able to provide any evidence of such benefits.
The U.S. media ignored the news when the head of the Foodborne Diseases branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the International Federation of Food Technologists both warned publicly that organic food is more likely to carry dangerous pathogens such as salmonella and E.coli O157 since it is commonly fertilized with animal manure. (Composting is an erratic process not guaranteed to consistently protect consumers from such bacteria.)
The real problem with organic farming, however, is the huge global shortage of organic nitrogen. The world has less than one-third of the organic N to produce today’s crops, let alone tripling food output for 2050.
A high-level technical committee appointed by the Danish government reported in 1999 that all-organic farming would cut Danish food production by 47 percent. Under an organic mandate, most of Denmark’s farmland would be planted to forage crops, to feed the cattle to provide the millions of tons of manure for crop nitrogen. Denmark would become a “manure landscape,” with the forage hauled to cattle feedlots, and then the manure hauled back out to be spread thickly over the countryside.
Dr. Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba (author of Feeding the World: the 21st Century Challenge, MIT Press, 2001) estimates that the United States would need the manure from another 900 million to one billion cattle, at perhaps three acres of forage per beast. Since the United States has only 2.1 billion acres in its lower 48 states, America would have room for its cities and cattle forage, but no room for food production, forests, or Yellowstone National Park.
Yet the New York Times, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and a wide range of other urban “thought leaders” are falling over themselves to recommend organic farming. It vividly demonstrates the agricultural ignorance of today’s urban elite.
Trade and the Biggest Agricultural Challenge in History
In December 1999, activists took over the streets of Seattle to protest world trade. They demanded, among other things, that everyone have the “right” to produce their own food.
The world’s good farmland, however, is not well distributed to meet the challenge of feeding 9 billon affluent people and their pets in 2050. China, for example, has 20 percent of the world’s population, but only 7 percent of the world’s arable land, and a similarly tiny percentage of its water. Such densely populated tropical countries as Indonesia and Bangladesh, and such arid countries as Egypt and Morocco will have severe difficulty providing high-quality diets to their 2050 populations from their own farms.
Meanwhile, in many countries where high-yield agriculture has been especially successful, farmers are able to produce more food than their consumers want. The marriage made in economic and environmental heaven is between the unmet demand for high-quality diets in densely populated Asian countries and the surplus productivity of North America, South America, and Europe.
Yet, while the world trade organization helped cut the average nonfarm tariff from 40 percent to 4 percent since 1947, the average farm product tariff is still more than 60 percent. Agricultural trade has been stifled by more than $300 billon per year in rich-country farm subsidies that would be essentially unnecessary if we had free trade.
The eco-groups and “social justice” groups claim to be blocking farm trade to save small family and traditional farms from corporate monopolies. But most of Europe’s peasant farmers have already moved to the cities, and the American family farm has grown larger to match rising urban incomes. The real impact of the Luddites is to block the changes in global farming patterns that are urgently needed to protect the very wildlife they claim to revere.
Rich Countries Are Destroying the Environment - Or Are They?
One of the eco-movement’s biggest falsehoods is that affluent nations are the enemies of environmental conservation.
Jared Diamond notes in his Pulitzer-winning book, Guns, Germs and Steel, that when Stone Age hunters reached North America, they wiped out more than 40 of its large, huntable mammal species in a historian’s eyeblink. Similar surges of extinctions occurred when skilled hunters reached Australia and New Guinea.
Today, in places like Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers are peddling supposedly aphrodisiac rhinoceros horn and “bushmeat” from endangered gorillas and rare civet cats-harvested with AK-47s.
The International Conservation Union (ICUN) warns that more than one billion people are trying support families in the world’s biodiversity hotspots with hunting and low-yield slash-and-burn farming. Mexico is losing three million acres of forest per year to the expansion of peasant farming. More than half of the forestland cleared in Honduras in recent decades has been “steepland,” with a slope of more than 30 degrees; every few years, a hurricane washes the steeplands into the valleys.
Yet the eco-movement presents hunter-gatherers and peasant farmers as the guardians of the world’s environmental future.
Most of the Third World is already in the most polluting phase of industrialization- burning huge amounts of coal to smelt massive amounts of iron, cooking food with wood from trees that aren’t replanted and caring too little about water pollution.
But there is hope for both humanity and Nature, thanks primarily to the affluence generated by knowledge, technology, and trade. A World Bank staff team has documented a bell-shaped curve in environmental protection. In the early years of industrialization, forests die and pollution surges. Rising populations (due to lower death rates) and higher incomes (better diets) demand more farmland. But when per capita incomes reach a level of $5,000 to $8,000 (Brazil and Malaysia now) a different set of factors take over. People are already well-fed and birth rates fall rapidly. With better inputs and management, crop yields rise, so no additional land is needed for food. Diesel fuel substitutes for firewood, even as forests are replanted. Affluent people want cleaner air and are willing and able to pay for it. They begin to demand clean rivers, for both health and aesthetics.
Dasgupta et al. find no hordes of high-pollution industries fleeing to unregulated Third World countries. (Such labor-intensive industries as garments, shoes, and computer services are not heavily polluting.)
Dr. Bjorn Lomborg’s widely publicized book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, has been fiercely condemned by eco-groups, but they have not been able to shake his key point: An objective analysis of the world’s available eco-data shows virtually all of the First World environmental trends are virtuous.
Biotechnology and the Biggest Agricultural Challenge in History
One of the most serious endemic problems for Africa farmers is a parasitic weed called witchweed. It invades Africa’s staple grain crops, corn, and sorghum, through their roots, so weeding doesn’t help. The farmers don’t even know witchweed is there- until their cornstalks sprout bright-colored flowers instead of grain. Witchweed can take half, or all, of a small farmer’s corn crop. But if herbicide-tolerant biotech corn is soaked in a systemic herbicide before planting, the witchweed invading the sprouting corn plant may killed internally.
This one off-the-shelf adaptation of a biotech transformation could add millions of tons to Africa’s annual grain production. The cost of the biotech corn seed would be low, and the amount of systemic herbicide needed to soak the seeds would be minimal. This one is waiting permission for field trials.
But, will African countries dare to permit biotech corn in their fields? Last year, the activists took their biotech scare campaign to drought-stricken southern Africa, and convinced the governments of some starving countries to ban the U.S. corn offered as food aid. The president of Zambia said he’d been told it was “poison.” Other African politicians feared that they would lose European export opportunities-and even European aid-if they permitted biotech crops to be grown or eaten.
Yet current food production and population trends would drive Africa to clear a Texas worth of its wildlands over the next 20 years, and still leave 200 million malnourished Africans.
Biotech firms have lost $30 billion in equity since the activists launched their biotech scare campaign. Public support for biotech crop research has been decimated. Europe is still banning the import of any biotech products, warning export farmers not to plant the biotech seeds. Any hope that biotech can lead us to re-tripled crop yields, eliminating hunger, and saving wildlands, is on hold.
Why do They Hate Farmers?
Actually, city folks don’t hate farmers. They just don’t understand farming. Our cities’ agricultural ignorance has gotten steadily worse as fewer of us grow up on farms, and modern agriculture transforms itself far beyond the postcard-friendly, traditional red-barn-and-white-fence pattern of the 19th century farm.
All today’s urban consumers know about farming is what they’ve been told by farmers and activists. Farmers tell them there’s a food surplus and that farm prices are too low. The activists tell them we should have organic farming to protect the environment. The city folks figure we can solve both problems with low-yield organic farming.
Professional agriculturists have never told the urban public anything coherent and consistent. We criticize the activists for telling falsehoods-but we don’t tell the public about our core motives: making sure that all the little kids in the world get high-quality nutrition while protecting the wildlands from expanded low-yield farming.
What Can Agriculturists Do?
In the beginning of the eco-attacks, agriculturists assumed that the eco-groups had done their homework and were focused on real problems in agriculture. Our response was to apologize. Now, we know that some eco-groups put their agenda before reality.
Agriculturists need to become more proactive. While giving eco-groups full credit for their conservation intent, agriculturists need to aggressively make the case that high-yield farming is the greatest humanitarian triumph in history; and, at the same time, mankind’s greatest environmental achievement. We must urgently remind the public of the billions of people not malnourished, millions of kids not starved, millions of pets well-fed, and millions of square miles of wildlands not plowed.
It may not be fair that agriculturists should have to take on this huge public service task. We aren’t really trained or equipped for it; and, we have crops to grow, livestock to feed and agribusinesses to run.
But the world has never before faced such levels of consumer ignorance on farming. Or the massive, amply-funded, media-connected phenomenon of non-governmental organizations completely lacking the checks and balances we put on governments, businesses, and academics.
If agriculturists-including all of the professional societies, all of the farm groups-and all of the companies do not become far more proactive, then high-yield agriculture in America will be truly lost.
Confronting the Organic Icon
High-yield agriculturists also need to ensure that organic food and farming is presented accurately to the urban public. We need to do this, not because of organic’s tiny fraction of the food market is important, nor because high-yield farmers are jealous of the organic price premiums. We need to confront the organic myths because organic food has been turned into an icon for both the public and its government regulators at the federal, state, and even local level.
The activists use the organic icon to promise not only “adequate” food, but better food even as they undercut the very basis of current world food output. They say organic food will be full to bursting with richer nutrients, and will bring the pink glow of health to our indoor children’s cheeks. It will disarm the dreadful, lurking cancer epidemic. And of course, it’s kinder to the environment, so we’ll have more butterflies and birds flitting through the fields. One shopper even told ABC-TV that her kids behaved better when she fed them organic food!
The activists’ real, oft-stated goal, is a world with fewer and less-materialist humans, living far lower on the food chain. When they talk about “adequate” food from organic farming, the diet may resemble the meager Cuban diet currently being produced mostly with organic farming-for the lucky two billion chosen to continue living on the planet.
The organic icon has already proven that it has the power to deny high-yield agriculture’s inputs and farming systems. Even where the farming changes reduce human food security and threaten to clear more farmland. (It might take the land area of Pennsylvania to put all our hogs outdoors, and the land area of New Jersey to put the chickens outdoors, but the city folks won’t believe it until the forest trees are actually being cut.)
The clincher on the organic sales pitch has always been fear: The lurking cancer threat of pesticide residues, key nutrients lost, massive soil erosion, lack of sustainability. None of these assertions is true, but the media cut scaremongers a lot of slack, and the assertions are repeated over and over.
Misrepresentation: Synthetic fertilizer poisons soils. The whole organic movement began with the falsehood that synthetic fertilizer (actually, natural nitrogen captured from the air through an industrial process) would poison the soil. No such soil poisoning has been documented. In fact, some of the plots at Britain’s famed Rothamsted experiment station have gotten inorganic fertilizers for more than 150 years with rising yields.
Misrepresentation: Pesticides cause cancer: The American Cancer Society says, “. . . the very low concentrations [of pesticides] found in some foods have not been associated with increased cancer risk. In fact, people who eat more fruits and vegetables, which may be contaminated with trace amounts of pesticides, generally have lower cancer risks than people who eat few fruits and vegetables.” When activists assert that pesticides are “linked to cancer,” they mean that high doses of the chemicals cause tumors in rats. So does over-feeding, and we overfeed the rats to maximize dosage. At high doses, half of everything tested, natural and man-made, causes tumors in rats.
Misrepresentation: Organic is better for the environment. If all-organic farming required the world to give up nitrogen fertilizer, and it took the manure from another 7 to 8 billion cattle to replace it, every bit of forest and wild meadow on the planet would have to be converted to cattle pasture. That hardly seems “better for the environment.”
Is it time for a congressional hearing on the claims and merits of organic food and farming?
We have an official new U.S. Department of Agriculture Organic Seal. When Secretary of Agriculture Glickman announced the organic standards, he said, “Organic is about how it is produced. Just because something is labeled as organic does not mean it is superior, safer or healthier than conventional food.”
The National Food processors Association asked the USDA to require that the organic labels include a statement saying the products are no more safe or nutritious than conventional foods. Is such a disclaimer still needed to prevent the seal from misleading consumers? About two-thirds of U.S. consumers in polls say the USDA organic seal means organic is better.
Britain’s No-Nonsense Organic Advertising
You’ll be interested in some of the British Advertising Standards Authority’s recent rulings on organic:
Claim: “Organic. As natural as nature intended. It’s the environmentally friendly alternative to chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides that can damage the soil and kill off nature’s own nutrients.”
ASA ruling: Misleading. The EU permits organics to use chemicals including slag, crude potassium salt, elemental sulphur, and insecticides such as Derris dust. Most readers would understand these substances to be “chemicals,” “fertilizers” or “pesticides.”
Claim: “[Organic food] is the safe choice for your family.”
ASA ruling: Misleading. Implies, without proof, that non-organic food is unsafe.
Claim: “You can taste the difference [in organic food].”
ASA ruling: Misleading. The advertisers sent the results of a poll in which 43 percent of consumers who expressed a preference for organic food said they preferred it because it tasted better. However, the ASA said it needed more rigorous evidence, such as blind taste tests.
Claim: “It’s healthy.” [referring to organic food]
ASA ruling: Misleading. People’s health depends more on the composition of their diets than on the nature of individual foods. Moreover, the advertisers had sent no clinical evidence to show that a diet of organic products was more healthy than the same diet consisting of non-organic food.
Claim by a supermarket selling conventionally-grown chickens: “All our chickens come from good homes.” A complainant stated that many of the chickens were reared intensively in broiler houses.
ASA ruling: Acceptable. Even in confinement, the conditions for the chickens were carefully regulated and monitored, and the supermarket’s animal welfare specifications exceeded Government guidelines.
The Bottom Line:
High-yield agriculture’s first task is to convey to the urban public the massive benefits of high yields that have saved billions of people, millions of pets and millions of square miles of wildlife.
I see in my mind’s eye a set of full-color magazine ads, showing kids around the globe with their pets and some wild babies (a baby elephant, lion cub, baby egret). The cut line would say, “Let’s be sure we can feed them all in the 21st century.”
Then, we must make certain that the public understands the real limits of organic food and farming.
This is all outside our job descriptions. But there is no other line of defense for today’s American society against a future of hunger, malnutrition, and environmental desolation.
Posted in Speeches |1 Comment »
The World Really Needs High-Yield Ag: It Just Doesn’t Know it Yet!
By cgfi | June 26, 2000
The Rev. Thomas Malthus’ famous question about whether humanity can continue to feed all the people was posed exactly 200 years ago.
It has taken us nearly all of that 200 years to be sure of an affirmative answer. Only recently have we been certain that the opening of the 21st century should see a new and fully-sustainable balance between food, population and the environment because of:
- Radically-declining birth rates virtually all over the world;
- Enormous advances being made in the scientific knowledge of how to boost food production;
- Vastly more affluence than any generation before has had, and thus more capital to invest in the roads, storage facilities, ships and research labs that encourage food production, distribution and preservation;
- An array of technologies—contraceptives, biotechnology, computers, satellite communications, cryogenics and a host of other technical advances—that can help to achieve a constructive balance between human needs and the ecology.
Compare this situation with any year before 1960. Before that year, massive famines seemed certain for much of the world; poverty was the global norm; the Green Revolution had not yet demonstrated its power.
By comparison, the world today has a virtual certainty of food production success. If humanity is to starve or displace wildlife in the 21st century, with today’s technology and a declining population growth rate, it could only be because we lack the political will.
However, that may be the case.
Today, the real question is not whether the world can produce enough food for a peak population of 8.0-8.5 billion people. It can. We could already produce enough to satisfy minimal caloric requirements for that many people if known technologies were fully extended, and production was divided equally among all consumers.
The world’s recent famines have been due to “mistakes of government,” such as civil wars and Mao Tse-tung’s ill-considered communal farms. Little hunger has been due to the lack of available food.
Forty percent of the world’s current crop output, in fact, goes to livestock and poultry feed so that affluent people can eat high-quality diets full of meat, milk, and eggs. In a hunger emergency, we can eat both the feedstuffs and the livestock, and later worry about rebuilding the flocks and herds.
The Food Challenge is Affluence
The food challenge of the 21st century, in fact, is not the challenge of population growth, but the challenge of affluence. Virtually all the people of the 21st century will be affluent by today’s standards and able to afford education, nice clothes and TV sets. Such people are unwilling to accept minimal diets.
The same modern couples who are willing to practice family planning, with two children instead of 15, demand that their two children get rich diets high in meat protein for growth, and milk calcium for strong bones. Affluent people insist on fresh fruits and vegetables all year round. Such diets take far more resources than boiled rice or corn-flour tortillas.
There is no vegetarian trend in the world; instead we are seeing the strongest surge of demand for resource-costly foods in all history. Currently, only about 4 percent of the First World’s population are even vegetarian, and most of these vegetarians consume lots of resource-costly eggs and dairy products.
There will even be a pet food challenge. The U.S. has 113 million pet cats and dogs for 270 million people. All over the world, ownership of companion animals and pet food sales rise with incomes. Already, China’s one-child policy is stimulating pet ownership. It is reasonable to project that China in 2050 will have more than 500 million cats and dogs. And, woe unto the public official who stands between a pet owner and Fluffy’s favorite food.
The debate in development economics is whether the challenge of affluence requires a 250 percent increase in the world’s food output, or a 300 percent increase. The universal human hunger for high-quality protein, combined with the pet factor, convinces us that the world must be able to triple, certainly more than double, its farm output in the next 40 years.
Land—the Scarcest Natural Resource
But this intense increase in food demand will force even greater competition between farming and wildlife for land.
· Agriculture already uses about 37 percent of the earth’s land surface, and any land not already in a city or a farm is wildlife habitat.
· If the world has 30 million wildlife species (a reasonable biologist’s “guesstimate”) then 25-27 million of them are probably in the tropical rain forests, with most of the remainder in such critical habitats as wetlands, coral reefs and mountain microclimates. These are places we have not farmed, and should not farm.
Through pesticide use, fertilizers, confinement meat production and modern food processing, modern high-yield farming has already saved millions of square miles of wildlife habitat.
Our peer-reviewed estimate is that the modern food system is currently saving something on the order of 15-20 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed for low-yield food production. That makes it the greatest conservation triumph in modern history.
Thus the key to conserving the natural world in the 21st century will be what the Hudson Institute calls “high-yield conservation.” Meeting both the food and forestry challenges, while leaving room for nature, will depend on our ability to continue increasing the yields per acre from plants, animals and trees on our best land, and transporting to where the people are demanding it. Our success will also depend heavily on how urgently we explore such high-tech methods as biotechnology in food and forestry.
Hamstringing High-Yield Conservation
Yet the world’s most advanced societies are attempting to legislate low-yield agriculture. All over the First World, government funding for agricultural research is being cut back, or shifted to low-yield “sustainable” farming. Governments in affluent countries subsidize low-yield organic farming, while regulators respond to public opinion by depriving the world’s high-yield farmers of time-tested pesticides and raising the safety hurdles to unjustifiably high levels.
In Africa, which has not yet had its Green Revolution, aid donors are demanding that farmers increase food production without modern pest protection or plant nutrients.
Large numbers of well-fed, affluent, influential people are opposing biotechnology, the most important unexploited advance in humanity’s knowledge of how to increase food production rapidly. There is serious question whether the power of biotechnology will be marshaled in agriculture soon enough to make its undoubtedly huge contribution to simultaneously saving people and wildlife.
Are modern societies attempting to surrender the planet back to hunger, malnutrition and massive losses in wildlife habitat? And if so, why?
The Environmentalist Campaign Against Modern Farming
The opponents of modern, high-yield agriculture and biotechnology are, ironically, gathered under the banner of environmentalism.
§ With the help of Rachel Carson’s brilliantly-flawed book, Silent Spring, eco-activists long maintained that modern farmers are poisoning children with cancer-causing chemicals. After 50 years of widespread pesticide use and billions of research dollars, science is still looking for the first case of cancer caused by pesticide residues. The U.S. National Research Council, the Canadian Cancer Institute and other medical authorities are trying to tell the public that the cancer fears are unfounded.
§ For fifty years, wildlife groups have universally claimed that modern farm chemicals were poisoning wildlife on a massive scale. However, the wildlife losses to today’s narrowly-targeted and rapidly-degrading chemicals are trivial — especially when compared with the millions of square miles of wildlife habitat saved by farmers’ high yields.
§ Eco-activists claim that more food means more people. But we are clearly in the first era of human history when more food has not meant more population. Births per woman in the Third World are down from 6.5 in 1960 to 3.0 today, and the birth rates have fallen fastest in the countries where the crop yields have risen most rapidly.
§ Environmentalists claim that modern farming is destroying the soil with rampant erosion. But farmers have used herbicides and tractors to invent conservation tillage, which cuts soil erosion per acre by 65 to 95 percent. A recent soil erosion study in Wisconsin finds that the farmers there are suffering only 5 percent as much erosion as they did during the “Dust Bowl” days of the 1930s.
§ Environmentalists oppose liberalized farm trade, though this is the only hope for much of Asia’s wildlife.
We must now realize that modern agriculture is being targeted, not because it is bad for the environment, but because modern farming 1) represents the greatest success of technological abundance; and 2) because farming controls much of the world’s land and water. The environmental movement seems to want managed scarcity for a few people. It seems to want more bison and prairie dogs—and fewer corn plants—on American land even if that sacrifices wildlands and biodiversity elsewhere.
The New Global Campaign Against Plant Nutrients
The latest eco-campaign is against plant nutrients. The U.S. supposedly has a crisis in water quality. The public is being told that vital plant nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus are environmental threats.
· Blue Baby Syndrome. Some environmental groups are demanding that the nitrogen limit in drinking water be lowered to from 10 parts per million to 5 ppm, apparently just to make it more difficult for modern agriculture to function. Never mind that the incidence of blue baby syndrome fell drastically during the very period when the use of chemical fertilizers and confinement feeding of livestock and poultry flourished. Never mind that the latest research indicates it is gastrointestinal inflammation and irritation which causes blue baby syndrome — not nitrates.
· Hypoxia. A White House task force has been appointed to resolve the hypoxia problem in the Gulf of Mexico. The hypoxic, or low-oxygen, zone in the Gulf doubled after 1990, from 3,500 square miles to 7,000 square miles. Agriculture, again, is being blamed. The presumed solution is to make Midwest farmers radically cut their use of fertilizer, and to “crack down” on big livestock and poultry farms. Never mind that hypoxic zones are characteristic of rivers that drain fertile lands all over the world. Never mind that the nutrients support rich fisheries. Never mind that cutting fertilizer use on the world’s good farmland would mean significantly lowering yields — and clearing forest for low-yield crops somewhere else in the world.
§ Manure as Toxic Waste. For 50 years, the critics of modern farming have held up organic crops fertilized with animal manure as the global ideal. Now the same critics are saying that “organic fertilizer” is “toxic waste”—if the animals or birds are being raised in a big confinement facility. Never mind that the big confinement feedlots and poultry houses protect the environment by collecting their wastes, and using them constructively to more sustainably raise the yields of feed crops.
· Volatilized nitrogen. Recently, the activist magazines — and even Science –have carried articles about the dangers of “too much fixed nitrogen.” (The Science article was authored by Peter Vitousek, a former graduate assistant of Paul Ehrlich, the ill-famed population scaremonger) They’re claiming that too many crops are being fertilized, and too many meat and milk animals are producing too much manure. They claim that too much fixed nitrogen might even change the global climate and our ecosystems. The U.S. National Research Council has already studied this possibility and dismissed it. The best recent study finds “surprsingly little change in the deposition of nitrogen.” The biggest negative impact is likely to be a slight disadvantage for wild legume plants.
· Complaints about Wonder Wheat. Recently the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center announced a major re-breeding of the wheat plant — done without biotechnology. CIMMYT says the new wheats have yielded up to 18 tons of grain per hectare, 50 percent more than any other wheats! The initial reaction cited in Science was distress that this would encourage high levels of fertilizer use. Never mind that it takes about 25 kilograms of fertilizer to grow a ton of wheat. We can grow 18 tons of wheat on one hectare with 400 kg of fertilizer, or we can clear another 17 hectares of wildlife habitat to grow one ton of wheat on each of 18 hectares.
The Future with Biotechnology
The world is in the early phases of exploring biotechnology’s potential—the “biplane stage,” to draw the analogy with airplanes. But already we see enough to know that biotechnology will be enormously important to conservation.
Saving Wild Species with Aluminum-tolerant Crops
Two researchers from Mexico discovered a way to overcome the aluminum toxicity that cuts crops yields by up to 80 percent on the acid soils characteristic of the tropics. Noting that some of the few plants that succeed on the world’s acid savannas secrete citric acid from their roots, they took a gene for citric acid secretion from a bacterium and put it into tobacco and papaya plants. Presto, they had acid-tolerant plants. The acid ties up the aluminum ions, and allows the plants to grow virtually unhindered. The Mexican researchers have since gotten the citric acid gene to work in rice plants, and hope that it can be used widely in crop species for the tropics.
Acid-soil crops have enormous potential for wildlife conservation. Acid soils make up 30 to 40 percent of the world’s arable land, and about 43 percent of the arable land in the tropics. Thus far, they have been one of the major barriers to providing adequate food in the very regions that are critical to wildlands conservation, the Third World tropics. These are the very areas where the populations are growing most rapidly, where incomes are rising most rapidly, where the food gaps are expanding most rapidly — and where most of the world’s biodiversity is located.
Raising Yields with Wild-Relative Genes
Two researchers from Cornell University reasoned that more than a century of inbreeding the world’s crop plants had significantly narrowed the genetic base of our crops. They also reasoned that the world’s gene banks contained a large number of genes from wild relatives of our crop plants. They selected a number of genes from wild relatives of the tomato family, a crop where yields have been rising by about 1 percent per year. The wild-relative genes produced a 50 percent gain in yields and a 23 percent gain in solids. The same researchers selected two promising genes from wild relatives of the rice plant — a crop where no yield gains had been achieved since the Chinese pioneered hybrids some 15 years ago. Each of the two genes produced a 17 percent gain in the highest-yielding Chinese hybrids; the genes are thought to be complementary, and capable of raising rice yield potential by 20 to 40 percent.
Improved Meat Animals with Biotech
Heretofore, methods for introducing new genes into livestock had a low efficiency — less than 10 percent. However, in the 24 November issue of The Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report a new method for producing transgenic animals that approaches 100 percent efficiency. Researchers put the foreign gene into the animal’s egg before it was fertilizer rather than shortly after. Obviously, this is another important step in creating animals with greater tolerance for pests and diseases, better feed conversion ratios and other practical advantages.
Fighting Human Malnutrition With Genetically-Modified Rice
The Rockefeller Foundation recently announced the success of its project to overcome two of the world’s largest sources of malnutrition with genetically-modified rice. Around the world, some 400 million people currently suffer a chronic severe shortage of Vitamin A. About 14 million of these people go blind every year, including about 8 million children. Rockefeller’s new “golden rice” contains beta carotene, which the human body readily turns into Vitamin A. (The beta-carotene literally turns the rice golden.) The new rice also has three new genes which overcome the chronic iron deficiency among people in rice cultures; 4 billion people suffer this iron deficiency, and the women are at increased risk of birth complications. (The phytate in rice tied up the iron in their bodies no matter how much iron they consumed; the new rice has phytase to free the iron. ) “Golden rice” will offer improved health to billions of women and children in rice-eating countries who could not have been helped through factory-food additives — at a tiny cost to society and no cost to them.
Saving Forests with Biotech Trees
The world could increase its forest harvest ten-fold if we planted just 5 percent of today’s wild forests in high-yield tree plantations. Such plantations are good-but-not-great wildlife habitat because they are not “fully natural,” but they could apparently take all of the logging pressures off 95 percent of the natural forests.
Trees have always been difficult to improve through crossbreeding because the time frames are so long. Biotechnology is already helping to provide the higher-yielding trees through cloning and tissue culture — which permit us to rapidly copy the fastest-growing, most pest-resistant trees in a species. When we master the tools of biotechnology more fully, we should be able to increase forest growth rates, drought tolerance, pest resistance and other important traits more directly, and even more effectively.
A Global Trend Toward More Activists
It is the nature of activists to push for something different.
In Peru, activists demanded an end to the chlorination of drinking water because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found chlorine, at high levels, could cause cancer in laboratory rats. Peruvian officials took the chlorine out of the water, and the cities promptly suffered a cholera epidemic that killed 7,000 people.
I don’t blame the activists. I blame the people who trusted the activists, and the people who should have represented the other side of the question. I also blame the press, which should have sought out the broader reality.
Like it or not, the world is on a trend to have more activists, in more countries. Democracy and affluence encourage activists and the free, open debate of public questions. The internet and instant global communication will also spur the creation of more activists. If modern agriculture is to succeed, it must learn to succeed in an activist-rich environment.
It’s not just agriculture, of course. Global warming activists have created global summits, an international treaty, and captured the political soul of a major U.S. presidential candidate — with less evidence than they’ve had of harm from modern agriculture.
But the activists have come so far, won so much power and prestige around the world that they can’t stop.
The Achilles Heel of High-Yield Agriculture—Regulation
It is true that the Green Movement has rarely won an election, anywhere in the world. But the desire to preserve Nature is so urgent in First World cities that the Greens haven’t needed to win elections. Environmental concern is so widespread that politicians race each other to embrace key points of environmental strategy. In America, Wirthlin polling a few years ago indicated that 75 percent of the public agrees with the statement, “We cannot set our environmental standards too high — regardless of cost.”
Because of the high public approval for the environment, we have an Environmental Protection Agency with virtually no Congressional oversight. The bureaucrats who work for EPA read newspapers and polling results. They assume that they can regulate “environmentally offending” industries, such as agriculture, in virtually any way they choose.
Modern farming’s reputation with the urban public is now so bad that it can no longer persuade the Congress to block unfavorable legislation, or force Federal agencies to modify unfavorable regulations and rulings. Not even farm-state politicians will commit political suicide on behalf of farming.
Betrayed by Modern Journalism?
Unfortunately, today’s mainstream media are not living up to their professional obligations for objectivity and resarch. Somewhere during the Vietnam era, journalists got the idea that refereeing the game of life was not as satisfying as playing on the winning team. Among the causes they have adopted as their own in recent decades is the environment.
Recently, our Center put out a press release noting that the water quality in North Carolina’s Black River has improved over the last 15 years, even though the hog population in its watershed had quintupled to one of the highest densities in the U.S. Of the 300+ media outlets we sent the press release to, one lone skeptical reporter called to inquire further. She asked whether the hog industry had sponsored the study. No, we told her, the data was from the State environmental agency. “But that’s not what my readers want to hear,” she lamented, then hung up.
That’s how far behind the public affairs curve modern agriculture currently finds itself. This is not a problem that can be dealt with by writing press releases, or by hosting community tours of farms and milk processing plants.
Can We Educate the Public on High-Yield Conservation — in Time?
Someone must tell the urban public about the environmental benefits of high-yield modern farming. I submit that it will have to be agriculture.
Agriculture and agricultural researchers must talk about saving wildlands and wild species with better seeds. We must talk about conquering soil erosion with high yields (so there’s less farmland to erode) and conservation tillage (which radically reduces erosion per acre of farmland). We must talk about preventing forest losses to slash-and-burn farming (the cause of destruction for two-thirds of the tropical forest we’ve lost). We must point out that where high-yield farming is practiced, the amount of forest is expanding. We must point out that the losses in wildlife habitat overwhelmingly occur where the farmers get low yields.
Agriculture and its researchers also need to point up the high risks of organic food. The Centers for Disease Control has been afraid to publicize it, but their own data seem to show that people who eat organic and “natural” foods are significantly more likely to be attacked by the virulent bacteria, E. coli O157:H7. Consumer Reports wrote that free-range chickens carried three times as much salmonella contamination.
The facts are clear: organic food is fertilized with animal manure—a major reservoir of bacterial contamination—and composting is neither careful enough nor hot enough to kill all of the dangerous organisms.
We must analyze every eco-activist proposal in terms of its land requirements:
- Organic farming for the world would mean clearing at least 5 million square miles of wildlife for clover and other green manure crops.
- Free-range chickens for the U.S. would take wildlands equal to all of the farmland in Pennsylvania.
- Reducing fertilizer usage in the Corn Belt would mean clearing many additional acres of poorer-quality land in some distant country to make up for the lost yield.
- Blocking free trade in farm products and farm inputs will probably mean clearing tropical forest for food self-sufficiency in Asia.
It should not be solely up to agriculture to prevent such a needless disaster. Agriculture has no history of public affairs campaigns or any real experience in conducting them. However, I see no other entity with the knowledge, the financial requirements and the direct interest to do it.
I doubt that the National Academy of Sciences or the National Research Council can turn public opinion around. The NRC’s recent report, Carcinogens and Anti-carcinogens in the Human Diet, is a landmark. It essentially says pesticide residues are no threat to public health. But the public is not reading the document, and the media are not reporting it. Moreover, a significant number of NAS members are encouraging the attacks on high-yield farming.
How can we present the environmental case for high-yield agriculture if the journalists will not write it and politicians fail to support it?
Modern agriculture must take its case directly to the people, through advertising.
My model is the American Plastics Council, which spends about $20 million per year to keep plastics virtually out of the environmental discussions in America. The Weyerhaeuser Company is another good example of positive imaging; Weyerhaeuser has been telling me for decades that it’s the tree-growing company. Not the tree-cutting company, not the tree-using company, but the tree-growing company.
David Brinkley, the most respected journalist in America today, has also shown us the way. ADM, the big corn and soybean processor, sponsors the Brinkley ads and they are doing a fabulous job.
- Brinkley notes that farmers are still the most indispensable people.
- He shows a cute little girl in Taiwan, and points out that her mother wants her to have meat and milk in her diet so she will grow strong and vigorous. Who could oppose that?
- The ads show families of deer and wild birds, and note that “the higher yields achieved by modern farmers are providing food — and in some cases even shelter –for families around the world.”
Many of the firms with billions of dollars invested in modern agriculture are already talking to urban America. DuPont and Dow have whole rosters of consumer products and millions of dollars worth of consumer advertising. Cooperatives like Land-o-Lakes and Countrymark have consumer ad budgets too. Wildlands conservation would be a winning message with both their customers and their farmer members.
So far, agriculture has failed to accept the challenge, and the momentum for high-yield conservation is waning. We are not increasing public investments in high-yield research. We are not creating support for the farm community. The regulators are continuing to strangle farm productivity.
In the long run, of course, farmers and farm researchers will be vindicated even without a public affairs campaign. But that vindication could come too late for the wildlands and the wild species—and too late for most of today’s high-tech farmers and agribusinesses.
At this point, it looks as though we will fail to meet the food challenge of the 21st century—not for lack of time, but for lack of realism in our public life. Our forefathers would have been ashamed for us.
###
Alex Avery is Director of Research and Education at the Center for Global Food Issues. He received his bachelors degree in biology and chemistry from Old Dominion University. Previous to joining the Center, Alex was a McKnight research fellow at Purdue University conducting basic plant research. Alex represented the Center at the United Nations World Food Summit in Rome in 1996. He is co-author of the Hudson Institute briefing paper Farming to Sustain the Environment, which addresses issues of agricultural sustainability from a practical and global perspective.
Alex has written on agricultural, food safety, regulatory and global population issues for major newspapers, including The Washington Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Des Moines Register. He has also been published in USA Today magazine, Regulation magazine, Feed Management, and scientific publications such as Environmental Health Perspectives and the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. His article on international food regulations will appear in the Wiley Encyclopedia of Food Science & Technology, second edition.
In addition to his publications, Alex has spoken to a wide range of groups, including the Australian Weed Science Society, American Veterinary Medical Association, American Phytopathological Society, as well as numerous industry and university audiences.
Posted in Speeches |No Comments »
Will the World Throw Away High Yield Agriculture?
By cgfi | March 17, 2000
Speech to the National Potato Promotion Board, Denver, Colorado
The Rev. Thomas Malthus’ famous question about whether humanity can continue to feed all the people was posed exactly 200 years ago.
It has taken us nearly all of that 200 years to be sure of an affirmative answer. Only recently have we been certain that the opening of the 21st century should see a new and fully-sustainable balance between food, population and the environment because of:
- Radically-declining birth rates virtually all over the world;
- Enormous advances being made in the scientific knowledge of how to boost food production;
- Vastly more affluence than any generation before has had, and thus more capital to invest in the roads, storage facilities, ships and research labs that encourage food production, distribution and preservation;
- An array of technologies—contraceptives, biotechnology, computers, satellite communications, cryogenics and a host of other technical advances—that can help to achieve a constructive balance between human needs and the ecology.
Compare this situation with any year before 1960. Before that year, massive famines seemed certain for much of the world; poverty was the global norm; the Green Revolution had not yet demonstrated its power.
By comparison, the world today has a virtual certainty of food production success. If humanity is to starve or displace wildlife in the 21st century, with today’s technology and a declining population growth rate, it could only be because we lack the political will.
However, that may be the case.
Today, the real question is not whether the world can produce enough food for a peak population of 8.0-8.5 billion people. It can. We could already produce enough to satisfy minimal caloric requirements for that many people if known technologies were fully extended, and production was divided equally among all consumers.
The world’s recent famines have been due to “mistakes of government,” such as civil wars and Mao Tse-tung’s ill-considered communal farms. Little hunger has been due to the lack of available food.
Forty percent of the world’s current crop output, in fact, goes to livestock and poultry feed so that affluent people can eat high-quality diets full of meat, milk, and eggs. In a hunger emergency, we can eat both the feedstuffs and the livestock, and later worry about rebuilding the flocks and herds.
The Food Challenge is Affluence
The food challenge of the 21st century, in fact, is not the challenge of population growth, but the challenge of affluence. Virtually all the people of the 21st century will be affluent by today’s standards and able to afford education, nice clothes and TV sets. Such people are unwilling to accept minimal diets.
The same modern couples who are willing to practice family planning, with two children instead of 15, demand that their two children get rich diets high in meat protein for growth, and milk calcium for strong bones. Affluent people insist on fresh fruits and vegetables all year round. Such diets take far more resources than boiled rice or corn-flour tortillas.
There is no vegetarian trend in the world; instead we are seeing the strongest surge of demand for resource-costly foods in all history. Currently, only about 4 percent of the First World’s population are even vegetarian, and most of these vegetarians consume lots of resource-costly eggs and dairy products.
There will even be a pet food challenge. The U.S. has 113 million pet cats and dogs for 270 million people. All over the world, ownership of companion animals and pet food sales rise with incomes. Already, China’s one-child policy is stimulating pet ownership. It is reasonable to project that China in 2050 will have more than 500 million cats and dogs. And, woe unto the public official who stands between a pet owner and Fluffy’s favorite food.
The debate in development economics is whether the challenge of affluence requires a 250 percent increase in the world’s food output, or a 300 percent increase. The universal human hunger for high-quality protein, combined with the pet factor, convinces us that the world must be able to triple, certainly more than double, its farm output in the next 40 years.
What About Potatoes?
As you all are likely well aware, the market of the future for North American potato growers is Asia, as Asia is the future market for almost all North American farmers. Whereas in Ireland, potatoes were the food of the poor, in Asia, potatoes are percieved as a luxury food—sold almost entirely as french fries in Western-style fast food outlets, such as Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonalds. However, as Asia’s economy grows, fast food is loosing its label as a “luxury” food and is entering the mainstream of Asian society.
So we can look to the fast food sectors as an indicator of where the market for potatoes is likely to go in the next several decades.
The Fast Food Industry is skyrocketing in Asia. One Hong Kong-based market analysis firm, Asian Market Intelligence, estimates China’s fast food sector have nearly $5 billion US dollars in sales in 1997, 20% from Western fast food outlets. Even better, the fast food sector has grown at an average rate of 50 percent annually in recent years. But this hardly does justice to the phenomenal growth in the frozen french fry market in recent years.
The US agricultural attache in China reports that China’s direct purchases of frozen french fries have increased ten-fold in the past three years, and re-exports through Hong Kong have tripled. McDonalds and KFC account for two thirds of the market share in french fries, demonstrating the close connection between french fry consumption and fast food chains.
Even more promising, from a long-term perspective, China’s supermarkets are beginning to stock frozen french fries for home consumption. This trend is especially marked in the north, where deep frying at home is common.
These trends indicate that french fries and potato products are making significant cultural inroads in Asia. A wave of young Chinese consumers raised on “treats” of McDonalds and other fast food is transforming the Chinese market. These trends will only increase in both scope and depth. More restaurants beyond simply fast food will start serving french fried potatoes, just as salsa and nachos have extended their base beyond Mexican restaurants. Already, french fries have moved out of simply Western-style fast food restaurants, and into Chinese fast food outlets.
Currently, China is estimated to import as much as 20,000 tons of french fries in 1997, with greater than 95 percent of this coming from the United States. China recently decided to lower import duties on french fries and the sector is making improvements in infrastructure to ensure the maintainence of high quality. China, although it produces potatoes, has yet to produce a quality potato with the proper characteristics for french fries.
Even in Japan, where Western foods have been popular for several decades, french fry consumption has been increasing recently. Because of the rising popularity of hamburger joints, french fry imports have been rising at 7-10 percent annually. This is a 250,000 to 300,000 ton potato import market, with almost 90 percent of these coming from the United States.
If China consumed half of the Japanese French fry consumption, it would be a 2 million ton potato import market. Is that possible? You bet, but it will take time for the Chinese to reach that level of individual income and for Chinese tastes to be Westernized to the level of the Japanese. However, it is not just the Chinese who will be our ultimate consumers. Asia includes three of the four largest nations: China, India, and Indonesia. And let’s not forget Malaysia, Korea, Taiwan, and Pakistan. The opportunity for export growth is simply astonishing.
Legislating Scarcity?
But at the same time that this enormous opportunity is emerging overseas, there are significant uncertainties arising here at home. Many thought just a couple of years ago that the only thing we had to worry about was opening up the trade barriers. Once we got that, we’d be OK. After all, we’d just solved that darned old “Delaney Clause” mess with the passage of the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) and the Freedom to Farm bill was going to get the government off our backs. Well, as Dennis and I were saying then, “hold on a minute.”
Everyone realized fairly quickly that the FQPA was going to cause some problems. Beyond the basic problems I have with methedology in assessing exposure of pesticides and the aggregate/cumulative risk cup analysis done by the EPA, the process is happening quite fast and growers are going to have to watch the process like a hawk from this point onward.
When Tim asked me to speak here today, he wanted me to cover the current FQPA situation and where it is going. The simple answer is that it’s going fast and loose.
The EPA is basing their pesticide review decisions on old data in some cases. As a result, the agency is not fully accounting for how important some of these compounds really are to potato growers. Methamidophos or Monitor is one example.
The fungicide TPTH was saved because potato growers demonstrated that it was a key chemical to many growers. But the EPA’s estimates were inaccurate and if the industry hadn’t been watching closely, it would have been lost. It’s that simple. Does that mean that you will be able to save every chemical currently allowed? Don’t bet on it.
At this point, Carol Browner has only a short time left. With Al Gore in the Presidential race, things could change rapidly. That is exactly how the FQPA was enacted in the first place. My advice and the advice of many I’ve spoken to is to watch the agency like a hawk. More importantly, if there are data gaps on the use of specific chemicals undergoing review that are important to the potato industry, GET THE DATA!! With FQPA already the law, the only significant defense you guys have is solid data. The more data the better because in the absence of data, the EPA will make “default” assumptions about pesticide exposure.
I must add, that potato growers have a few things in their favor over growers of some other crops. While the market for pesticides is larger in corn or soybeans, your market is no small potatoes. You are an important market for fungicides and insecticides, a market that the chemical companies want to keep. That means, under FQPA’s unified risk cup, where chemicals with similar modes of action and from other crops are combined when calculating consumer exposure and risk. As the risk cup gets full, manufacturers will have to dump pesticide uses in order to keep the risk cup from overflowing. Potatoes, while not the biggest, will likely be behind many other commodities when it comes time to ditching uses.
To make things doubly uncertain, on top of FQPA, biotechnology is now controversial. We went from getting rid of Delaney and going after trade access, to overly stringent pesticide laws and a consumer confusion crisis in three years. The Chinese curse of “May you live in Interesting times” is definitely upon us.
For those of you who think that pesticide issues are completely separate from biotechnology issues, let me clarify things for you: it is all part of one, much larger conflict.
Robert Shapiro, head of Monsanto, actually believed when they started developing biotech crops that the activists would see the virtue in biotech crops and would eventually support the technology. After the biotech fiasco broke in Europe, Shapiro was so niave that Monsanto’s advertising campaign gave out the web site addresses of the opposition!
The promise of biotechnology is immeasurable. We couldn’t begin to forecast what developments will be coming in twenty years if biotech is allowed to move forward and there is even modest consumer acceptance. Already we have the New Leaf and New Leaf Plus potatoes. I’m told that the New Leaf Plus is good, but not perfect. There may be some yield drag. But the trial results I’ve seen so far look pretty good. A drastic reduction in the average amount of insecticide sprays and excellent virus protection. One set of photos even showed pheasant tracks in a NLP potato field, and the researcher mentioned that it was the first time in here over ten year career that she’d seen such tracks.
In the pipeline are a whole range of biotech potato improvements, ranging from greater virus and fungus resistant varieties to bruise resistant potatoes.
The reality is, however, that if we fail to communicate the benefits and need for biotechnology, we risk loosing it to over regulation and consumer fear. It was no surprise that Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were vehemently against the new agricultural technology. It was a surprise, however, that many in agriculture were caught off guard by the environmentalist opposition. Where have such people been during the last 20 years. There hasn’t been a single new agricultural advancement in this century that hasn’t been opposed by some group, mostly environmentalists.
In the early part of this century, some, despite the high risk of milk-borne tuberculosis, vehemently opposed milk pasteurization. Then it was hybrid corn. The it was insecticides, especially DDT. Then it was herbicides. Now it’s biotechnology.
As proof that the opposition is to modern agriculture, not social or human health concerns, I call your attention to the comments of two prominent critics of biotechnology in response to the announcement of the development of the Golden Rice by scientists funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Golden rice is rice engineered to contain Beta carotene, the precursor to Vitamin A, and inactivates a protein in rice, phytase, that inhibits iron availability. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the research to develop golden rice because Vitamin A deficiency and iron deficiency plague many rice-based cultures. It is estimated that 4 million children go blind each year because of vitamin A deficiency. An estimated 2 billion women suffer birth complications as a result of iron deficiency. Golden rice was developed as a humanitarian effort to relieve these simple dietary deficiencies. The International Rice Research Institute is now developing regional varieties of rice which incorporate golden rice’s traits and will then give the germplasm to national governments for free.
But just look at the response from environmentalists and activists. Margaret Mellon is with the Union of Concerned Scientists, in Washington, D.C. She claims that golden rice is simply a ploy by the agribusiness community to put a humanitarian face on a dangerous technology. She says “there are ten simple things we can do to solve these problems without biotechnology, from building roads and distributing iron tablets to encouraging people to grow gourds.”
Let me get this straight, instead of allowing people access to a rice seeds they could grow themselves which would alleviate all of these problems, we’re supposed to just build an entire network of roads and infrastructure so that we can distribute pills and pumpkin seeds? News flash, Ms. Mellon, if they had such diverse backyard gardens and infrastructure, they likely wouldn’t be nutritionally deficient to begin with.
Vandana Shiva, an Indian “community activist,” is even more silly. She states that all we have to do is get poor Asians to eat more meat, milk, eggs, dairy products, and green leafy vegetables. Even sillier, she suggests that golden rice is dangerous because it could poison people with too much vitamin A! These are people suffering from chronic vitamin A deficiency. Besides, Ms. Shiva is extremely ignorant of the physiological realities. The golden rice contains only Beta carotene, not vitamin A. Beta carotene is a precursor to vitamin A, which means it is extremely difficult to overdose on Beta carotene. One nutritionist I spoke to said that a person would have to eat 10 times the normal amount of rice each day for months before any problems would show, and even then, they would have ample warning that something is wrong because their skin would begin to turn orange well before toxic levels of vitamin A occurred.
The activists opposition to golden rice exposes their real colors. They aren’t against bad biotechnology, the activists are against all biotechnology. How else to explain their opposition to golden rice. It can’t be because they fear it will be used as a tool of multinational corporations to monopolize agriculture—it was funded by a philanthropic charitable foundation and will be given away to farmers free. It can’t be because they fear environmental or ecological consequences—the golden rice contains no new plant genes, only existing genes from wild plants. The only explanation is that these people are luddite elitists pandering to their own paranoia.
“Golden rice” will offer improved health to billions of women and children in rice-eating countries who could not have been helped through factory-food additives—at a tiny cost to society and no cost to them.
We must stop hoping and waiting for people to realize how important these technologies are for us and the planet and begin communicating on a level that consumers understand.
Land—the Scarcest Natural Resource
We in agriculture have a duty to help people understand that the intense increase in food demand I spoke of earlier will force even greater competition between farming and wildlife for land.
· Agriculture already uses about 37 percent of the earth’s land surface, and any land not already in a city or a farm is wildlife habitat.
· If the world has 30 million wildlife species (a reasonable biologist’s “guesstimate”) then 25-27 million of them are probably in the tropical rain forests, with most of the remainder in such critical habitats as wetlands, coral reefs and mountain microclimates. These are places we have not farmed, and should not farm.
Through pesticide use, fertilizers, confinement meat production and modern food processing, modern high-yield farming has already saved millions of square miles of wildlife habitat.
Our peer-reviewed estimate is that the modern food system is currently saving something on the order of 15-20 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed for low-yield food production. That makes it the greatest conservation triumph in modern history.
Thus the key to conserving the natural world in the 21st century will be what the Hudson Institute calls “high-yield conservation.” Meeting both the food and forestry challenges, while leaving room for nature, will depend on our ability to continue increasing the yields per acre from plants, animals and trees on our best land, and transporting to where the people are demanding it. Our success will also depend heavily on how urgently we explore such high-tech methods as biotechnology in food and forestry.
Hamstringing High-Yield Conservation
Yet the world’s most advanced societies are attempting to legislate low-yield agriculture. All over the First World, government funding for agricultural research is being cut back, or shifted to low-yield “sustainable” farming. Governments in affluent countries subsidize low-yield organic farming, while regulators respond to public opinion by depriving the world’s high-yield farmers of time-tested pesticides and raising the safety hurdles to unjustifiably high levels.
In Africa, which has not yet had its Green Revolution, aid donors are demanding that farmers increase food production without modern pest protection or plant nutrients.
Large numbers of well-fed, affluent, influential people are opposing biotechnology, the most important unexploited advance in humanity’s knowledge of how to increase food production rapidly. There is serious question whether the power of biotechnology will be marshaled in agriculture soon enough to make its undoubtedly huge contribution to simultaneously saving people and wildlife.
Are modern societies attempting to surrender the planet back to hunger, malnutrition and massive losses in wildlife habitat? And if so, why?
The Environmentalist Campaign Against Modern Farming
The opponents of modern, high-yield agriculture and biotechnology are, ironically, gathered under the banner of environmentalism.
§ With the help of Rachel Carson’s brilliantly-flawed book, Silent Spring, eco-activists long maintained that modern farmers are poisoning children with cancer-causing chemicals. After 50 years of widespread pesticide use and billions of research dollars, science is still looking for the first case of cancer caused by pesticide residues. The U.S. National Research Council, the Canad